I’m using an SSH deploy key to push changes to git. These pushes then result in notifications sent to Slack. The committer info is correct in the notifications. So far so good.

But where does the name of the pusher, i.e. the first thing in the notification text (“John Doe pushed to …”) come from? Note again that I’m using a deploy key with no user association to push the changes. For me the user is always the same, probably the individual who set up the project in the first place. I’d like it to show something else, for example a generic “Someone” or the SSH key’s comment, because the current behavior is confusing.

I see there is a “Username” field in the Slack notification settings, but that does not affect the name I mean.

The terrible workaround I’m using for now is to create a dummy/ghost user with the name “Someone”, and assign the ssh keys to that user.

But as said, it’s an ugly hack. I’m somewhat disappointed with the lack of responses here – I would imagine that this is something that could be trivially answered from memory by a bunch of people familiar with the codebase.

If there are no such people around, perhaps someone can at least point us to where in the codebase is the entry point for pushes, to make it easier for us to find this out ourselves. I believe that is where the association with the undesired user in this case occurs.